Protect your data

The AU IT Department is encouraging all staff and students at the university to exercise extreme caution with regard to electronic data at present. This is because the hacker group known as Anonymous have issued a warning about an attack on schools, universities and other public-sector institutions in a range of European countries including Denmark. The hackers have given this action the code name “Operation Europe”, and the purpose is to uncover corruption.

Nobody knows if this is an official announcement by Anonymous, but the message has been spotted on YouTube and elsewhere. And according to Ole Boulund Knudsen at AU IT, there is every reason to take the threat seriously.

“We’re definitely going to take a few precautions, and this is always important even though we aren’t actually attacked,” he says.

Ole Boulund Knudsen has a list of precautions that all staff and students should observe:

1. Never give your password to anyone else. Not even to the IT department, colleagues, management, friends or family.
2. Make sure that you always keep a backup of your data. The best idea is to save it on a network drive where the IT department takes a backup. Contact AU IT if you need to save large amounts of data.
3. Change your password if you haven’t done this for a long time – or if you have told anybody else what your password is.
4. If you find out that there has been a breach of IT security, or if you suspect that there has been a breach, contact AU IT.

Anonymous are known as a highly skilled group, and they also collaborate with other groups. They are believed to be behind a number of attacks on both public-sector institutions and private-sector companies, including DDOS attacks and actual burglaries. The group is politically motivated, and are not known for their destructive behaviour. Their goal is to find sensitive information and then publish it.